


A Moment of Silence (in the heart of the storm)

by yopumpkinhead



Category: Marvel (Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Avengers (2012), Blood and Gore, Brotherhood, Brothers, Gen, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 17:46:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1396849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yopumpkinhead/pseuds/yopumpkinhead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Death sends visions to comfort the dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Moment of Silence (in the heart of the storm)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this amazing fanart](http://fallintosanity.tumblr.com/post/150389543748/soltian-against-the-serpent-goes-othins-son) by Soltian. I lost the link to the image between when I first saw it and when I wrote this story, so the dialogue isn't quite the same, but hopefully the feeling still carries over.

Thor couldn’t see.

It was his first thought, and it was enough to make him panic. He couldn’t see, eyes straining against darkness, hands flailing—no, not flailing, what was wrong with his hands? They weren’t moving correctly, weren’t responding to him, he was trapped, and then he registered the weight of stone crushing him, the odor of cement dust choking him, and he remembered.

The local police had tried to evacuate all the buildings in the combat zone, but Loki and his newest ally had attacked suddenly, without any warning, and not all the residents had managed to escape. The ally was a sorcerer calling himself the Verdant Lord, whose otherwise-inconsequential power was being massively enhanced by a magic circlet. He had summoned enormous thorned vines which enveloped several tall residential buildings and crushed them inwards. Thor had heard screaming and dove into one of the crumbling buildings. He remembered finding a young couple, ashen-faced and trapped by the vines. He remembered wrenching the vines away long enough for the couple to run.

He didn’t remember anything after that.

He coughed, choking helplessly on the dust in the air. The movement jolted the rubble pinning him and it shifted, sending pain tearing through his arm and shoulder. But it also let in a ray of light, slim and wavering with dust.

Thor pushed against the rubble, only half-aware of where his limbs were, barely able to feel them as distinct parts of himself past the throbbing pain that made up his body. The pile of stone shifted some more and he bit back a cry as something sharp came loose and cracked against his spine – but he wrenched his head and shoulders free of the rubble.

He could see now, and he immediately regretted it. A thick bar of rusted metal jabbed wholly through his upper arm; another stabbed into his thigh. He hadn’t had time to summon his armor before rushing into the building, and his exposed skin was shredded where stone, metal, and glass had ground past and through him as it crumbled. He didn’t know where his allies were, didn’t know if they knew where he was. The last he’d seen of Steve was the captain being slammed repeatedly into the ground by the sorcerer's vines, while Tony had flown up to engage Loki where he’d stood on top of another building, safely away from the vines’ destruction. The Hulk had been occupied by a pride of vicious Alfheim cave lions which Loki had summoned, and the two SHIELD agents had gone to aid the evacuation efforts.

Thor couldn’t count on any of them for help.

He strained again, blood surging around the metal embedded in his arm and leg, and managed to drag free the limbs which were not impaled. Squinting through the dust, Thor could see that the building hadn’t been completely demolished; parts of the ceiling immediately overhead were still intact, as well as two of the walls and half the roof far above. But they looked none too steady, and even as he thought it, the ground shook hard from some impact outside, and a piece of wall from three floors up creaked, groaned, and toppled.

Thor covered his head with his free arm and tried not to breathe. When it was over, he had a bloody new gouge in his arm and could barely see for all the plaster dust, but he was still alive. For now. He got a grip on the metal bar through his other arm, gritted his teeth, and yanked it free. The pain flattened him, and he couldn’t stop himself from crying out – but he could move his arm. He gave himself ten breaths to recover before doing the same for the bar through his leg.

He didn’t know how long he blacked out after that, but when he came to, one of his eyes was mostly gummed shut with blood. The building was trembling again, and he wasn’t sure if the vibrations were caused by the ongoing fight outside, or if he was just imagining things, if the fight had ended and his friends were safe. His whole body was shaking with pain as he scrabbled free of the last of the rubble, his thoughts slow and fogged and strange. He didn’t quite remember the space between pushing himself to his hands and knees, and collapsing at the bottom of the heap of broken concrete and steel, though streaks of blood marked his path down the rubble. At least, even dazed as he was, he’d had the presence of mind to press himself against one of the few walls that still stood, for whatever tiny protection that might offer him against further collapses. Unnatural colors danced across his vision, blotted out here and there by black spots, and he kept finding himself sprawled flat on the floor even though he thought he’d just pushed himself upright again.

He finally managed to sit up, leaning against the wall. The bar through his leg had missed the big artery – if it hadn’t he’d have bled out already – but the wound was still bleeding. So were the ones on his arms, on his face and chest and back, blood dripping down past his eye, onto his hands. Red like his cape, stained with plaster dust but still tangled around him. Red like… like…

He blinked, and forced himself to lift his head. He couldn’t pass out now. But even as he raised his chin, even as he struggled to open his eyes more than a slit, the colors dancing in his vision swirled and formed into green and gold, pale skin and black hair.

Loki.

“ _Thor,_ ” Loki breathed. His green eyes were wide, his expression strange. Thor thought it had to mean something, but he couldn’t think what. His head ached terribly, his body throbbing with pain and disrupting his thoughts. His vision wavered, Loki dissolving into a green and gold blur, for a moment becoming vines that reached hungrily for him before he blinked and they resolved into Loki once more.

Bracing himself against the wall at his back, Thor struggled to his feet. Loki was here, but the other Avengers weren’t. It was up to Thor to face him. It occurred to him that he didn’t know where Mjölnir was; he raised a hand to call it. Or tried to. He was on his knees without quite remembering how he’d got there, and he couldn’t see Loki any more. He swayed, the room spinning around him, and then he was on the floor, legs tangled in front of him, his upper body leaning against something uneven and solid and warm.

It took him a few seconds to realize what the gold and green arm around his chest meant.

“Loki,” he whispered.

“Be quiet,” Loki said above him. His voice vibrated in his chest, against Thor’s back, sharp and strange yet reassuringly familiar.

“I suppose we have to fight now,” Thor said. The thought hurt, stabbing into his heart like the iron had stabbed through his flesh: the knowing that if Loki was there, he would ( _Thor would_ ) pick a fight. He couldn’t quite remember why they fought, couldn’t remember what was so terrible, so terribly important, that they must fight about it so much. Couldn’t remember what he needed to stop Loki from doing, not with Loki’s arm wound tight around him, with the familiar scent of knife oil and leather and the elven soap Loki favored cutting through the dust, with long graceful fingers drifting over Thor’s wounds, gentle enough not to cause pain.

“Later,” Loki said quietly. “Just… be still now.”

Thor could do that, at least. He didn’t remember closing his eyes, couldn’t remember why sagging against his brother was a bad idea. He could just barely feel Loki’s fingers moving over his skin, trailing warm magic, pausing over the worst of the gouges so that the magic seeped into Thor’s very blood, tendrils of warmth that pushed back the fog clouding his thoughts—

Tendrils. Vines.

The Verdant Lord who’d crushed the building.

Thor jolted back to consciousness, flailing weakly against Loki’s grip, but his brother didn’t let go. “The sorcerer,” Thor gasped. “He’s—”

“—dead,” Loki said. “He wasn’t paying attention, and leapt right in front of my weapon.” He paused, and even without looking up at him, Thor could hear the dark smile in his voice. “Terribly careless of him.”

That made Thor chuckle. Loki’s hand came up to brush across the gash on Thor’s forehead. “Now,” Loki said, “be quiet, brother. Rest.”

Rest. That sounded good. Something still tugged at the edges of Thor’s thoughts, a warning of danger, a whisper that he shouldn’t stay there, but he couldn’t remember why. Loki was a familiar, comforting presence against his back, and the man who’d torn down the building was dead. Thor’s eyes drifted closed again.

The last thing he felt was his brother's hand against his jaw, cool and gentle and smoothing away the pain.

*             *             *

“Thor? _Thor!_ ”

Thor blinked, and it was a few seconds before he remembered to be surprised that his eyes were working properly again. The blood that had covered his face was gone, and several people stood over him where he lay on a stretcher. He recognized the uniforms of Midgard’s traveling healers, who rode in large wagons and came to help whenever people were injured. He also recognized Tony, still in his iron armor but with his helmet cradled under his arm.

Tony broke into a relieved smile when he saw that Thor was awake. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t move, you had a twelve-story building fall on you.”

Thor didn’t argue. While the healers were attempting to be gentle as they cleaned and bound his wounds, pain still screamed through his body. He missed Loki’s featherlight healing—

 _Loki_.

He remembered, suddenly, Loki’s arm around his chest, Loki’s voice telling him to rest. The memory was blurred, vague and broken and distorted by pain and delirium, but Loki had been there. Loki had found him, had healed Thor’s wounds.

Had he?

If he’d been there when the other Avengers arrived, if they’d seen Loki with Thor while Thor was so injured...

“Loki,” Thor whispered. His throat was raw and his voice barely audible, and he tried again. “Loki. My brother. Where is he?”

“Gone,” Tony said, with an annoyed scowl. “Captain Planet’s evil twin pulled the buildings down on top of you, then Loki killed him and disappeared. We still have no idea what the hell they were after. Or what Loki was planning.” He shook his head. “I mean, damn. He stabbed his own partner in the back without batting an eye. That’s cold, even for him.”

“He escaped?” Thor asked.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “He vanished. Goddamn ninja magic bullshit.” He hesitated, then added, “Sorry it took so long to get to you. We had to make sure he was really gone, and then we had to dig you out. You were pretty well buried, Steve didn’t think even you would have survived. But I guess Asgardians are tougher than that, huh?”

Thor closed his eyes, his head aching. _You were pretty well buried._ He remembered digging himself out, he remembered seeing Loki – but how could he, if he’d still been buried when the rescuers found him? And anyway, what cause would Loki have had to come to Thor, to tend his wounds, to tell him to rest as if they were still boys on adventure?

No, it couldn’t have been Loki. Thor knew well that serious injuries and the drawing-close of Death could inspire hallucinations, false visions meant to comfort the dying. That was all it had been, all it _could_ have been. Loki had tried to kill Thor many times over, had long since declared that their relationship was not one of brothers but one of enemies. He would not have held Thor, would not have soothed and healed him. Thor had merely hallucinated his presence, a comforting illusion provided by his delirious mind to cope with the pain of being crushed almost to death.

“Thor?”

Tony’s voice, somewhere above him, sounding worried. Thor blinked his eyes open again to find his lashes damp with tears. It would not do for Tony to think him so weak that he cried for his pain, so he said, “Forgive me. I only… I had a dream, while I was trapped.”

Tony studied him for a moment, then abruptly grinned and joked, “So, out-of-body experience, huh? Got to watch the cute EMT giving you CPR, and now you’re sad ‘cause she’s over treating Steve?”

But his words did not relieve Thor as much as they should; Tony was as shrewd as Loki when it came to reading people, though he did not flaunt his skill as Loki had. Still, he was giving Thor the illusion of privacy, of secrets, and Thor managed a weak smile of gratitude. Tony patted him lightly on the shoulder, mindful of Thor’s injuries, then turned away, presumably to go check on their other teammates.

Thor sagged back against the stretcher, giving himself over to the healers’ ministrations. He didn’t want to think anymore, didn’t want to remember how much he missed his brother. His heart ached, a sharp familiar pain that had nothing to do with the building that had fallen on him, and he wanted nothing more than to fade into sleep.

In the moment before the darkness and exhaustion enveloped him, he caught the faintest whiff of knife oil, leather, and elven soap, still clinging to his skin where Loki had held him.


End file.
